22 March 2011

Jamaican Civil Registration of Births

When researching Jewish families in any part of the world, it is always nice to have multiple sources for information. It can not only be useful in verifying current information but may also provide help in adding new family members. One great example of this, are the records of the Civil Registration of Births for Jamaica.In their wonderful book, The Jews of Jamaica Tombstone Inscriptions 1663-1880 (FHL book #979.92 V3),Richard D. Barnett and Philip Wright, list the burials of 2 sons of Jacob Henry De Pass and his wife Louise Alberga. Those sons, George Cecil and Arthur Rich are buried in Kingston, Jamaica at the Orange Street Cemetery. While it is possible that these are the only 2 children in the family, another record to search would be helpful in finding out if that were true.Thanks to the Historical Record Collections database located at http://www.familysearch.org/, that is now possible to do from home. On the front page of FamilySearch, the collections can be browsed by location. Simply by clicking on the link for Caribbean, Central and South America, (Shown Below) all of the collections for that region can be shown.

In that list of 75 collections for the region, there are 3 specifically for Jamaica. Included in those are the Jamaica, Civil Birth Registrations with over 1.25 million records. Included with those records are all the images. This makes searching the records quite easy.

In looking for records of the family of Jacob Henry De Pass and his wife Louise Alberga, a simple search using the last name De Pass yields 660 hits. Included amongst those records are the birth registrations of four daughters. They are an unnamed daughter born in 1880, as well as Violet May born in 1882, Dorris Marjorie born in 1889 and Norah Gwendolan born in 1890. According to the records (shown below) all 4 daughters were born in Kingston.

A further search of these records finds many more members of the family. While this example is of Jamaica, there are now hundreds of databases from around the world that may include record of our Jewish ancestors. A few moments to get acquainted with the site could prove to be most beneficial in your research.

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Why the Knowles Collection?

From an early age I have been trying to find as much information as I could about my gggrandfather, Morris DavidRosenbaum, a Polish Jew. In my search and through my work as a Reference Consultant in the British Research unit at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, I have compiled records of The Jewish people. This collection, linking Jewish families, is available free to all. Hopefully, people will come together to share the stories of their own families.

Size of the databases (28 Jan 2015)

Jews of British Isles 208,349Jews of Europe380,637Jews of North America489,400Jews of South America and Caribbean21,351Jews of Africa & Orient37,618Jews of South Pacific21,518

Total 1,158,873

Growth and Change

In the 7 years since the Knowles Collection was first published, the numbers have climbed from just over 7,500 to over 1,000,000as of April of 2014. So many of our ancestors left their native lands for new homes. Because of that movement the collection will now be in 6 different databases. All of them will be under the Knowles Collection umbrella. They are Jewsof The British Isles; Jews of the North America; Jews of Europe; Jews of South America and the Caribbean; and Jews of Africa and the Orient and the newest one, Jews of the Southern Pacific.. This is a great indication of how universal our families are, and of how much still needs to be done.